Taking Off, Staying Put

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When I was 13, I decided that my life was in need of a massive overhaul. As a Jewish kid at an all black elementary school, and then the only Democrat at a waspy Republican middle school, I knew that my particular case required more extreme measures than a new haircut or the right Esprit t-shirt. In the passenger seat of my mother’s minivan after a road trip in which we’d sold inspirational buttons at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in Wyoming, I turned to my mother. “It’s time I got my own apartment,” I said. Slow dancing with Pierre, a recovering drug addict, on the ballroom floor of the Marriot in Jackson Hole, had given me a taste of the world. I now knew it would be impossible to achieve my potential in our neighborhood stuffed with truckers, morticians, bingo-night callers and Dollywood fanatics.

My mother laughed. “Why don’t you get your own ATM card or redecorate your room?” she suggested. But instead of cutting out wedding dresses to paper my walls, I cut out maps. Visions of becoming someone else by being somewhere else danced in my head. I pictured myself in exotic places with exotic men. I certainly didn’t want to marry Pierre—or anyone else—but being in the proximity of an accent outside of my school zone was intoxicating.

I bided my time while preparing for take off until 20, when I flew across the Atlantic with a rucksack and a girlfriend, crisscrossing through Eastern Europe with a Eurail pass financed by the sale of my aging Honda Prelude that still had the remnants of an anarchist Barbie hot glue-gunned to the hood. We hopped ships, ran out on bar tabs and once, drank too much of someone else’s Southern Comfort to get off the train in the right country. We never had a plan outside of the moment. “Which beer?” or “which boy?” I believed that cutting myself out of one picture and gluing it on top of another would give me the context and definition I lacked on my own.

However, adding stamps to my passport and notches to my bedpost only obscured the person I was trying to uncover. I flew home hungry for what I remembered to be the unpretentious expanse of the American West. Certainly it would be easier to reinvent myself in my own language. Alone and with friends, I zigzagged through the states via road trip, Greyhound, Amtrak and plane, stopping to live for a few months on a dude ranch, a farm and a cruise ship. But by the end of it all, I was devastated that the cowboy, the farmer and the deckhand had failed to bring forth my potential.